Meet the Equity Team
Kelly Downes has been at Berklee since March 2018. Previously, she was the institutional equity investigator at Simmons College and a member of the Simmons bias response team, which strived to promote a positive and inclusive campus environment. She was also a practicing lawyer for several years, focusing primarily on investigations, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and intimate partner violence.
Lee Helmken Cherry has been at Berklee since February 2018. Previously, she served as a health educator at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she co-led their sexual and relationship violence prevention and survivor support initiative. In that role, she was responsible for strategic planning efforts as well as planning, implementing, and evaluating sexual violence prevention and response programming and trainings on campus. She also led a peer education program for sexual violence prevention and, before that, served as a project coordinator of the administrative and research cores at the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory University.
Jaclyn Calovine started at Berklee in July 2018. She most recently served as the director of community standards at Babson College. In that role, she provided direct leadership for and management of all undergraduate and graduate student conduct functions. She also served as Babson’s lead investigator in all student-related gender-based misconduct grievances. She spent six years in the Office of Community Standards at Babson in a variety of roles, first as a coordinator, then as an assistant director, then as an associate director, and finally as director.
Amanda Bedford started at Berklee in June 2018 and brings a wide range of experience from the fields of higher education and the arts to this role. She most recently served as a project coordinator for Lesley University's Center for Reading Recovery and Literacy Collaborative. Prior to her work at Lesley, she held positions at the Boston Children's Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.